Q&A, the show that launched a million tweets, turns 10

By Neil McMahon

It was the pilot – taped May 8, 2008 – that launched a million tweets. Host? Tony Jones. Guests? Politicians from the major parties. Subject matter? Sexual harassment. The more things change…

Front and centre 10 years ago, when the ABC first corralled a panel under Jones's whip and invited audience members to ask questions, was the scandal over chair-sniffing WA MP Troy Buswell. Also fresh, then and today: the guests on the panel.

There was Tony Abbott, who has since gone from gadfly backbencher to Opposition leader, to PM, and back to gadfly backbencher. Alongside was Labor's Tanya Plibersek, in 2008 a newly minted minister under Kevin Rudd, who has also traversed both sides of the parliament in the decade since. Both remain front and centre in political debate, as does the TV experiment they called Q&A.

In an exclusive joint interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the program, host Tony Jones and the program's creator and executive producer Peter McEvoy recalled its humble beginnings.

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Q&A presenter Tony Jones.Credit:Wolter Peeters

The ABC wanted a discussion program; McEvoy was charged with bringing it to life. Jones says he was on board early but insisted on one key factor: "I wanted it to be live and more or less made that a condition of being involved."

Live it was and live it remains, with all the thrills and perils that entails. Looking back, Jones and McEvoy remember that pilot as an exciting if half-baked experiment.

"The striking thing about it now is that we weren't really ready," McEvoy says.

"The set wasn't finished so we did it in front of walls of brown paper, there was no Q&A logo on the floor – I think someone chalked one in…"

Julia Gillard gave the show its best one-liner to date.

Jones: "We did have a real-live Tony Abbott and a real-live Tanya Plibersek…"

McEvoy: "The good thing was people understood it and were straight into it … after the program was finished my boss had a look and said, 'You've got a program'. It worked straight away."

Q&A producer Peter McEvoy and host Tony Jones.Credit:Wolter Peeters

The first broadcast episode, on May 22, 2008, a one-on-one with Rudd, set the tone. It placed Q&A at the centre of national debate. And it gave political leaders a platform to perform – for the voters, for their colleagues and for the media – for better and sometimes worse.

Jones and McEvoy have seen four PMs come and go – and one come again: Rudd, Julia Gillard, Rudd again, Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

Malcolm Turnbull's leather jacket – iconic or ironic?

As McEvoy recalls, Abbott became "our most frequent participant … until he became prime minister", when he became the program's most virulent foe after the Zaky Mallah affair. Rudd also had a mixed relationship with the program; a master of detail, he thrived until the night he faced an audience of students and his charm surrendered to his notorious irritability.

"It was one of those where you think, the wheels are starting to come off here," says Jones. (Rudd was out of The Lodge four months later.)

Tony Jones in action.Credit:Wolter Peeters

PM Gillard "recognised that she did very well on the program", says McEvoy. "I think she recognised that was a good forum for her to answer difficult questions." And she delivered what he calls "the best Q&A one-liner of all time".

Jones picks up the story, quoting a question to Gillard: "On a scale of one to 10, how big a tool is Mark Latham? – pause, pause, for a fraction of a second – and then, 'Some things are beyond measure'."

And then there's Turnbull, the program's most frequent guest, whose appearance in a leather jacket has become an iconic – and ironic – reflection of his positioning as the great progressive hope in the Abbott era.

Did Turnbull use Q&A as a marketing tool?

Jones: "You could say he used it, or I'd prefer to say he used it as a way to raise his public profile and to show his depth across a whole range of subjects and he did that very well."

The program has just as often been a forum for ordinary people to command the national stage.

There was Zaky Mallah, whose question about terrorism laws embroiled Q&A in the defining scandal of its decade on air. "Ridiculously overblown," says McEvoy of that 2015 uproar. Jones recalls being depicted in a cartoon as a severed head in the storm that followed. "Just a head, having been decapitated. I say nothing but had that happened in any other context …"

There was Ethan Egart, a kid from Darwin, whose video question prompted the reversal of a deportation order against his 10-year-old friend. "The power of one," says Jones of that show-stopping moment. "Every now and then they present the best moments of the program."

And on day one of the 2016 federal campaign came Duncan Storrar, whose question on the fairness of the tax system made him a national hero – and almost destroyed him when his past came under sustained scrutiny by sections of the media.

McEvoy says of Storrar: "There's so much focus on attacking the person … it's not about the legitimacy of what Duncan asked. Unfortunately that applies to both left and right. People spend so much time discussing the character of the questioner or the panelist rather than addressing the substance of it."

There have been special-issue programs – on disability, Shakespeare, the Magna Carta – topics that can appear left-field but often produce great television. "Those were opportunities to do something completely different," says McEvoy. "We want to surprise people. We don't want to be obvious."

And there has been Twitter: Q&A pioneered live engagement with the Twitter-sphere and it has become an integral part of the program. McEvoy calls it "a perfect meeting between a live program … and a medium that's about short, pithy live comments about live events. Those two things came together and it didn't exist when we first started".

Both Jones and McEvoy maintain Q&A remains relevant, and still ripe for reinvention as it enters its second decade. It is, of course, as loathed as it is loved - and the loving and loathing comes from left and right.

It's all in the eye of the beholder, says Jones.

"Our point of view is the opposite of what we're sometimes accused of being – a single-tune program that has one perspective and pushes it. Nothing could be further from the truth in our minds and I think nothing could be further from the truth of the program. But when you're a critic … you look for what you dislike and you ignore what you would otherwise like."

Brian Cox: Rock star physicist, blessed with an epic eye-roll – never better displayed than when he encountered One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts in an excruciating climate change debate.

Nana Mouskouri: More than a singer, more than a politician, the legend from Greece stole the show, not least when she closed the episode singing The White Rose of Athens.

Alan Jones: The legendary ABC foe entered the lion's den – and kept coming back, disarming viewers by proving himself more than a shock jock. The biggest shock: ABC viewers found themselves agreeing with him. Host Tony Jones says: "He's got this brilliant ability to play to the audience that's he taking to."

Richard Dawkins and George Pell: The atheist and the archbishop went head-to-head for the ultimate Q&A on the biggest question – does God exist?It was the week after Easter, but there was still no clear answer.

Jimmy Barnes and Magda Szubanski: The same-sex marriage debate featured on the first Q&A in 2008 and seemingly every other episode afterwards - but never more memorably than when Barnes and Szubanski delivered a showbiz royalty smackdown on the issue in 2016.

Malcolm Turnbull: When his political obituary is written, the indelible image of the presumed progressive "leather-jacket Q&A Malcolm" will feature prominently.

Kevin Rudd: The very first guest in 2008, and the man whose prime ministership – six months old when Q&A debuted – ushered in a decade of political upheaval that ensured the program has never been short of raw material.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied: Her showdown with Jacqui Lambie over Sharia law in early 2017 set the stage for a year of media torment.

Simon Sheikh: The Get-Up founder stunned and confused the panel, the studio audience and viewers at home when he fainted live on air in 2012.